Zoe Thanatos (23 page)

“So did my stubborn brother finally
kiss you?”

The change in topic caught her by
surprise and she found herself laughing, the happy feeling in her cheeks and
eyes calming the rest of her unsettled nerves. “How did you know?”

“He’s a first class brooder. I
could tell something had gone on between you two, and that
something
didn’t.” She jokingly knocked her shoulder against Zoe and smiled brightly. “I
admit I had my reservations when he first told me about you, but now I think
it’s for the best. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him genuinely smile.”

Zoe felt her cheeks blush as she
thought of Evan and the kisses they shared. Hadn’t he smiled generously and
frequently in their time together on Earth? Was it really such a happy place
for him?

“What was he like before we met?”

Eva chuckled. “Serious. Reserved.
Private. He spent a great amount of time away from Terra, out discovering
different universes. I think Gaia was his favorite even before he met you. Each
time he came home there would be new scenery in our residence. Once our entire common
room was nothing but shades of white and blue; hundreds of small black birds
waddling about in the distance. There were great mountains of ice just floating
about like monoliths. Icebergs. Every time I was in the room I’d find myself
shivering just from the sight of so much coldness.”

“Polar ice caps,” Zoe whispered
through a smile. She had never seen them in person but knew they were a
magnificent sight. She felt a small balloon of pride inside her at the thought
of Evan appreciating Earth, her home. “The birds are called penguins.”

“He always seemed to have this
romantic notion of Gaia, that of all the universes it was the most beautiful.”

“Why do you think he left so
often?”

Eva shrugged. “Who knows? He just
always seemed to be looking for something that didn’t exist here.” She looked
at Zoe knowingly, a bit of a sly smile on her lips. Zoe felt her cheeks flush
again. As idyllic as it seemed she knew better than to think he was unknowingly
looking for her. That was a notion for fairytales and movies, not her life.

The light in the cabin dimmed
around them as the transport entered through a long corridor. The natural
landscape of Terra was gone and replaced with the standard concrete, steel and
glass.

“We’re here.”

Zoe nodded at Eva as she watched
the transport descend slowly into the Transport Station parallel to a platform.
When they came to a complete stop the doors opened with a pneumatic hiss,
beckoning them out into the deserted platform.

“Come on. It shouldn’t be too far.
Keep on the lookout for Crown Soldiers.”

If there were any soldiers they
were hiding very effectively; Last City looked as deserted as a ghost town, a
sprawling city interconnected between veins of glass corridors. Zoe let Eva
lead the way through the maze until they came to a building marked City Center
in a tidy font. The concrete facade of the building shared a similarity with
the Brutalism architecture she had seen so often at home.

The interior of the City Center
rose up towards a ceiling that vaulted several yards above their heads. Despite
the Brutalism exterior, the interior was strangely art deco, the popular style
that evoked the era of the roaring twenties and dancers in fringed flapper
dresses. A series of rooms branched off through arcaded walls of golden
archways, adding a touch of gothic air to the space. It wasn’t the Spanish
architecture her home in Santa Barbara was known for, but the style made her
homesick nonetheless.

“I think this is it!” Eva called.
They were separated only by a few feet as Zoe lost herself in the splendor of
the room’s architecture. She followed the sound of Eva’s voice until she saw
it: a secondhand gate made of glass and steel that closely resembled the gates
from the Transport Station.

“It doesn’t look like it has
power,” she observed. The gate she had traveled through had glowed to life in
her presence. This new gate sat in the middle of a dimly lit corridor where no
one would have thought to look for it, sans glow. It wasn’t very impressive.

Eva rummaged through the bag she
carried and pulled out the glass box from Zoe’s house. With delicate care she
removed a loosely-wound scroll before placing the box back into the bag.

“You’re up.” She handed the old
piece of paper to Zoe, who merely looked at her, confused.

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“I don’t know. The King said you
would.”

Zoe took the scroll and unraveled
it, the foreign map sketched in careful ink spreading out before her. She
stared at it for a long moment, willing the map to somehow show her what she
was supposed to do.
This isn’t going to work
. How could the King have
faith in her to know what to do? Many people were putting their lives in her
hands and she couldn’t help but think it was an enormous mistake on their part.
They were expecting magic from someone who didn’t even know her own identity.
The expectation was too great.

And yet they were counting on her,
and more to the point, they placed their trust in her. Obviously they had more
faith in her than she had in herself. She could buckle under the weight of
their expectation and give in to disappointment, or she could use their faith
as motivation. All she had to do was try.

She stared at the map in her hands
and tried to empty her mind of any distracting thoughts. The thoughts
dissipated, Last City falling away from her sight as she followed the drawn
lines of the map with her eyes. The ambient sounds of the room faded into the
background.

A picture took shape in her mind,
colors bleeding in like a damp watercolor across a blank canvas. There was a
thick blanket of the greenest trees she had ever seen, spread out like an army
and expanding out into a deep forest. There were bright flowers with prickly
petals and what looked like antennae, proliferating in sporadic bursts of
purple budding off of green vines that tangled around the tree branches. The
sky was a vibrant amethyst, stars dusted across as far as the eye cloud see as
violent swirls of billowing clouds the color of thunder and the sea coiled
around each other. The atmosphere descended around her, the amethyst diluting
into aqua and finally a pale gold that touched the tips of the green trees.

In the distance through the trees
she could just make out the sound of a song that sounded like her name. She
couldn’t place the scale of distance to judge how far away the sound was coming
from.

A force of mass grabbed at her hand
before the sky fell around her. Her body exploded into a ribbon of atoms as she
was pulled through the sky like when she stepped through the gate on Earth
towards Terra. The movement was too quick to decipher anything visually and the
world moved around her in a stream of vaporous color. Even quicker than it had
started she felt her body form and reshape, atoms packing tightly together as
she materialized. A cold tingling radiated through her extremities. She thought
she would never get used to the sensation of coming undone and being put back
together again. It just wasn’t natural.

Her eyes opened into a golden light
that settled delicately around her, touching the tips of green trees like she
had seen in her mind. Around them the forest rose like spires towards a
sparkling amethyst sky, the colors as deep and vibrant as she had imagined not
a moment before. She turned in place and saw the forest spread out around her,
green into deep purple as the landscape stretched from the ground up to the
sky. Was she still imagining it? The world around her looked nothing like the
dreary monochromatic world of Terra that she had seen from the transport
windows.

“How did you do it?” Eva whispered,
sounding utterly enthralled.

Zoe hadn’t noticed she was standing
by her side. Her face was turned upward toward the sky, her blue eyes wide in
amazement. “Do what?”

Eva swallowed and lowered her head,
allowing her eyes to take in the explosion of colorful life around them. “You
brought us here on your own. We hadn’t even stepped into the gate yet.”

What?!
“How is that
possible?”

“I don’t know, you tell me! You
must have done something!”

Zoe’s shoulders shrugged up to her
ears. “I have no clue. It’s like it this place just came to life in my mind. I
didn’t even know what was happening.”

Eva’s mouth opened but she made no
sound. She closed it and swallowed again, took in a deep breath of air and
filled her chest until it expanded out from her body like a balloon. “Okay well
we’re here. What’s next? Where are we supposed to go?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Yes, you!” she cried. “Look at the
map again, maybe there’s a clue.”

They stood huddled together as Zoe
stretched out the map in their hands. A knot constricted in her stomach as she
realized the map had changed, coming to life with color as the world around
them had. Strokes of green flourishes formed a circumference around a gold icon
in the shape of a crown, expanding and contracting like the rhythm of a
heartbeat. Next to it a second icon pulsated.

“Is that possible?” Eva whispered
from her side, her eyes locked on the two images.

“What is it?”

“A laurel wreath. It’s the sigil of
my family name, or it used to be. I haven’t seen one since my parents died. My
mother wore one around her head when we laid her to rest, just as her mother
before her, and her grandmother before that.” Her soft voice clipped as she
spoke, the enormity of the words tinged with both sadness and appreciation.

Zoe gently placed a hand on Eva’s
shoulder to comfort her. She could only imagine how difficult remembering the
past would be for her. She at least had the benefit of not knowing what she was
missing. Eva, on the other hand, knew that a piece of her life was forgotten,
and to remember after so long must have been painful. Zoe reminded herself that
their journey was not just about
her
finding answers, but also about all
the people whose lives had been taken, wholly or partially, by the Stratons.

She looked to the crown on the map
again and watched it beat against the ancient paper,
thump
-
thump
,
thump
-
thump
. It was her heartbeat. It echoed against her insides,
the pulse moving steadily beneath her skin. Her eyes moved slowly around the
circumference of their symbols, taking in the green flourishes with growing
comprehension.

Show me where to go
, she
thought. An invisible line bisected the green forming a path. She turned slowly
and watched as the crown moved concurrently, the golden tips aligning along the
path like an arrow pointing the way. She didn’t need to turn very far. A half
circle came to life on the paper, a luminescent silver-white ink rising up, dyeing
the page.

“Are you seeing this?”

“Look!” Eva gasped.

Zoe looked up in time to see the
trees parting into a serpentine pathway moving between the bifurcated forests.
Beyond the horizon of the pathway a white light emerged, blooming like a flower
in the distance.

With the map in one hand, she
reached down with her other and found Eva. Wordlessly they entwined their
fingers and squeezed tightly, each giving the other the support they each
needed. Hand-in-hand they began the long walk towards the white light in the
distance.

The absence of the daily noises of
Terra filled Kyra Straton with an unsettling feeling. She wasn’t used to the
quiet. She walked through the corridors of Royal City, the entirety of the
public spaces at her disposal. Everyone had been sent to their residences, a
temporary lock-down that she could only imagine raised their curiosities.  When
life was ordinary, residents milled around the grounds of the city going about
their lives peacefully and purposefully. As their Queen she didn’t need to do
much. There was seldom any misconduct in Terra and her Crown Soldiers
effectively dealt with any domestic issues. As far as monarchies went, she was
a fairly hands-off Queen. Not like the Queen Mother.

Korina Straton, the first Straton
Queen, was a Queen unlike any that preceded her. She hadn’t inherited the
Crown; she fought for it, won it, and wore it with pride on her face and blood
on her hands. For years she waited, using her family’s resources to build an
army strong enough to steal the Crown from the Thanatos Queen, and she
succeeded, taking out the entire family and their loyal companions. Nearly all
of them, at least. In the time since the demise of the Thanatos family no one
had ever claimed to have seen one in Terra, let alone claim to be one. The fact
that anyone could remember the fallen sovereign’s name was in and of itself a
near impossibility.

Her feet carried her into the
Throne Room, the vast hall an empty cavern of magnificent height and opulence
that was hers alone to appreciate. The ceremonial thrones that belonged to her
and the King sat stiff like statues, dominating the vast expanse of the room.
She had taken a seat on her literal throne on only a few occasions, mostly for
official celebrations or other such events. Having wandered all around the
realm she found herself back where she started, her own home. With a sigh she
climbed the pedestal that elevated the two ornate chairs above the ground and
sat, the high back of the chair stiffening her posture significantly. She
closed her eyes as her mind wandered back to the Queen Mother

From the first day the Straton
Queen assumed her role she had exiled the Thanatos family name, forbidding anyone
to ever utter the word again. The Crown Soldiers made sure to enforce the law,
using their new and imposing status as a weapon against anyone who would
disobey. She hadn’t so much as heard the name Thea Thanatos since her own
childhood, and it still had an effect on her.